Introducing our Band of the Week: Young Galaxy

Many will marvel at modern civilization’s ability to communicate with other individuals hundreds of thousands of miles across the other side of the globe, using The Facebook, MyFace, Twittle, and other such wondrous interweb contraptions. These same people may deem the most impressive of all of these devices to be “Skorp”. I’ve just been told by my attorney that it’s in fact called “Skype”. I’m new to all of this. Either way, being able to converse with people in real time, while witnessing a (theoretically) high quality live video feed of them, all for free, could be interpreted as a pinnacle of modern technology, and might also be what long distance relationships were invented for.

Well, to be honest, I fucking hate Skype. My most prominent memories of trying to use it amount to waiting half an hour on a Sunday morning for internet connections to decide to work adequately, then viewing pixelated images of my parents attempt to engage my incredibly hungover self in stilted conversations about the family dog looking a bit tired. To make matters worse, this was during my time living abroad last year, in a location that lagged a whopping 8 hours behind London. Yes, 5pm GMT on a Sunday might be all dandy for you, but please think of my inability to moderate alcoholic intake on a Saturday night.

However, Skype was the communicative method of choice for Canadian natives Young Galaxy to keep in touch with the always enigmatic Swedish producer (and one half of duo Studio) Dan Lissvik. Young Galaxy completed their third LP at home in Canadia-ville (Montreal, to be exact), and then sent it across the ocean to Lissvik. I like to imagine that the notation for each song composition was scratched onto some kind of parchment scroll which was then stuffed into a bottle and thrown into the waves, but I think they probably just e-mailed him some mp3 files. How unromantic.

Lissvik took 9 months to re-sculpt and produce the tracks he was sent; at the end of this period, Young Galaxy sat infront of a laptop in Montreal on Skype, with Lissvik on the other end all the way over in Gothenburg where he had been holed up working on the album. He played them his fully produced, re-tinkered versions of the tracks that made up ‘Shapeshifting’ for the first time, and that album- completely unedited- is what was delivered to the listening public today through Smalltown Supersound Records. It’s almost like a modern day Romeo and Juliet…with synths.

-Tim Robins